


overwrite

by besselfcn



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Brief Underage, Choking, Flashbacks, Forced Sterilization, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Somnophilia, Trans Fenris (Dragon Age), just fenris things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:40:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22621915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: “When you write on a piece of vellum you can’t get rid of the ink, once it’s written down,” Aveline had said. “So people take little strips of new vellum, and put it over with paste, so they can put something new down on top. You seem to do that quite a lot, you know.”“I’ve never written on vellum,” Fenris reminded her.“It’s a metaphor,” she’d sighed. “But you knew that, and you’re being sour about it.”
Relationships: Danarius/Fenris, Fenris/Hawke (Dragon Age)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 54





	overwrite

**Author's Note:**

> me: what was the point of this fic again  
> sciencefictioness: hurt fenris?  
> me: right yeah. hurt fenris. 
> 
> If you're wondering where this fits in the DA2 timeline, it doesn't.

Hawke tells him, “We’ll take things at your pace.”

Fenris is infuriated; not with him, or with anything he’s said, but with the sickly, slippery feeling that rolls around in his stomach. With the shaking of his hands. With himself, how he pushed Hawke away roughly the moment Hawke grabbed onto his hair, just like he had a few days ago when Hawke gripped his thigh in a way he hadn’t been expecting, just like he had a few days before that when--

It’s been coming, this conversation. Fenris has just been pushing it away. 

“I am not fragile,” he reminds Hawke. 

“Did I say you were?” Hawke says. His arm is curled around Fenris’s stomach; his mouth is against the back of his neck. Restricting. Safe. Too close. Not pressed close enough. 

“You think that you could hurt me,” Fenris says. “So you are trying to put up extra precautions around me.”

“That doesn’t mean I think you’re fragile.”

The silence permeates through the room. Hawke has gotten frustratingly good at this; leaving room for Fenris to talk, until he feels compelled to. 

“I do not think I know how to do what you are asking of me,” Fenris admits. 

Hawke presses a kiss to the knob at the back of his neck; to his shoulder; to his ribs. “That’s alright,” he says. “We’ll figure that out, too.”

*

Aveline told him once that he seems to have an obssession with writing things over. 

“What in the hell does that mean,” he’d grumbled, and she’d gestured around his mansion, his wine, his clothes, and none of it his.

“When you write on a piece of vellum you can’t get rid of the ink, once it’s written down,” she’d said. “So people take little strips of new vellum, and put it over with paste, so they can put something new down on top. You seem to do that quite a lot, you know.”

Fenris had scowled and taken another long draw of wine. “I’ve never written on vellum,” he reminded her.

“It’s a metaphor,” she’d sighed. “But you knew that, and you’re being sour about it.”

Then he’d poured her a glass of wine, and beaten her at Wicked Grace, and she’d shut up about the whole thing. 

*

“Come in here, little wolf. Nobody’s come to kill me this fine evening, I think.”

He relaxes his shoulders, his stance. Around him, the castle walls are quiet; the other guests have long gone to bed, while his master stays awake working late into the night. He works best with the moon at his side, he says; it focuses his attention like nothing else.

Like nearly nothing else.

Fenris slips inside the room. He closes the door behind him without being asked; it will be easier to hear if anyone is trying to enter, in any case. 

Danarius sits cross-legged on the bed. In front of him are not scrolls to study or sigils to copy down, but large, heavy-looking cards with intricate, swirling designs. Human women dressed all in white with eyes aflame; great serpents spiraling up and around each other, choking the sky; a man with a sword through the center of his chest. 

“Have you ever played Wicked Grace?” Danarius asks. He grasps the cards with a smile.

“No, Master,” Fenris tells him. 

“Of course not,” Danarius says, his mouth turned into a smile, like he’s just told himself some private joke. “Sit there. I’ll teach you.”

Fenris sits. He studies the game like he would study a battlefield; all tactics and brash confidence. By the end, he’s won two games out of seven, and Danarius beams at him. 

“You are clever, aren’t you,” he says, and the praise flows warm over him, following the lyrium in his skin. 

*

Hawke’s fingers are in his shirt; his mouth is searching Fenris’s teeth and neck and shoulders like he wishes he could sink into them and is only just restraining himself. He’s hard against Fenris’s leg, his breath hot and heady and stuttering.

“What do you want, Fenris,” he asks, like it’s easy, like that question even has an answer. 

_Start somewhere_ , Hawke had said. _Anywhere you like. We can always stop, too. Always._

 _I know,_ Fenris had snapped.

 _Yeah, yeah_ , Hawke had snorted. _Not fragile_.

“Let me--” Fenris begins, and then feels himself falter and his face flush. He turns his eyes away. To _ask_ for something--and Hawke thinks this will _help_? “I’ll use my mouth on you.”

Hawke sucks in a breath. “Okay,” he breathes. “Yes. Okay. That sounds great.”

Fenris laughs, in the bottom of his chest, and sinks to his knees to pull at Hawke’s breeches.

*

 _You’re so good_ , he hears, but it’s distant, and the ringing in his ears is close--so close--like the breath he’s trying to take in, like the floor beneath his knees, growing further all the while. His throat is full, his head held steady, and he is still, he is open, he is willing and obedient, even as his nose is pinched shut and he thinks he might lose consciousness; and then electricity in him, through him, through every swirling mark tattooed across his skin, and he bucks and seizes and feels his eyes roll back into his skull and his throat close up and then his master comes down his throat, making sounds of unfiltered pleasure, and he can breathe again, gasping. 

“You are beautiful,” Danarius tells him, as he’s on his hands and knees taking in desperate gulps of air, saliva running down his chin, eyes full of tears.

He sits back on his heels. He looks up. 

“Thank you, Master,” he says. 

He means it.

*

“Oh, Fenris,” Hawke groans, and Fenris smiles to know it’s him doing that--his mouth, his tongue. His movements are steady and sure. His hands bracket Hawke’s thighs. He lets Hawke’s hips buck a little--but just a little, and then he pulls back, and it’s enough warning that Hawke whines and settles back down and lets Fenris take care of him the way he likes. 

“I’m close,” Hawke warns. 

Fenris pulls off; he lets his hand keep working. “I certainly hope so,” he says dryly, and then swallows Hawke back down. 

Hawke is trembling now, his thighs shaking. Fenris hesitates, just a moment--then he takes Hawke’s hand and puts it against his neck, his first two fingers pressed against the thick convergence of lyrium marks at the top of his spine. Then he takes his own hand and slips it into the front of his underclothes. 

“Fenris,” Hawke says, and it comes out breathy but stern as he recognizes the gesture from the rare occasions they’ve done this in the past. “You’re sure?”

Fenris simply looks up at him from under lidded eyes and watches his resolve crumble. 

“Oh, fuck,” Hawke breathes, and Fenris can feel it already, like static in the air, building around Hawke’s fingers, Fenris’s neck--”oh, _fuck_ ”--and he lets the spell go, lets it wash through the veins in his body. 

It’s a fireball spell in miniscule--a warmth that spreads through Fenris’s body, relaxes his muscles, makes him pliant and warm under Hawke’s hands, and there’s the itch of pain from the lyrium but it’s soothed by the spreading warmth, curling over him, inside him, and he comes against his own hand, and then Hawke follows him not far after. 

In the bath, Hawke massages the knots from his shoulders. Fenris nearly falls asleep. 

*

He woke up more than once to Danarius already inside him; his fingers or his cock, depending on how deeply Fenris had been sleeping, on how gentle Danarius had been. He was perfectly calm when it happened; he’d open his eyes and find himself somewhere else outside of his head, outside of himself. Whatever warm body was being violated without even the illusion of control was not his and could not be his, so he would come back to himself only when Danarius was finished with it. 

“Good morning,” Danarius would say afterwards. 

“Good morning, Master,” he would respond, and Danarius would smile, and it felt almost like a prize to be won. 

*

The first time he’d slept with Hawke was fumbling. Awkward. Exhilerating. 

Hawke had nearly dragged him to his bedroom, desperate to get his own clothes off and then Fenris’s. Fenris was buzzing with energy, with heat; he thought he might slip away into the Fade at any moment, with how fast his heart was pumping, how quickly the adrenaline spread out inside him. 

“I’ve been thinking about this,” Hawke had said. “For _years_.”

“You should act more, and think less,” Fenris had growled.

Hawke laughed. “First anyone’s ever said that to me, I’ll tell you what.”

They’d undressed, and Hawke had only briefly taken pause when he noticed Fenris’s conspicuous lack of a cock. 

“I don’t have any preventatives on me,” he’d said. “But we can do other things, that’s fine, I don’t mind, I just want to get my hands on you, _fuck_.”

Fenris had laughed quietly, knots in his stomach unwinding. “I cannot bear children,” he informed Hawke. 

“Oh, thank the Maker,” Hawke had sighed. “Because I really wanted to fuck you.”

And he did; and Fenris cried; and in the morning, he left. 

Then, one day, he came back. 

*

This is not the first time. 

Fenris knows this from the way his master confidently undresses him; he knows it from the way his body moves on muscle memory to react. He knows it because most of him is buried deep under rubble and ashes but it is not gone; it echoes in his chest; and this echoes louder than most. 

“My little wolf,” Danarius breathes. “You beautiful creature. You are my most treasured accomplishment.”

Fenris’s skin is on fire. His head still swims with the pain; with the memory of pain; with the reality of it, crawling through his nerves. He has been poured full of healing magic. It is not enough. It will never be enough again. He is burning from the inside out. 

“Lie down,” Danarius tells him, and he does. He opens his legs without being asked. 

Danarius sighs and runs his hand up Fenris’s thigh. “You perfect thing.”

Fenris’s voice is gone from screaming. His body is too weak to stand on its own from the pain of the ritual. His master fucks him, slow and adoring. 

“You are mine now,” Danarius tells him, one hand on his chin, hips rocking into Fenris’s body. Every jostle rattles his chattering teeth together. “Forever.”

“Yours,” Fenris says, or tries to say; he mouths it, his throat too raw to make sounds. 

“Mine,” Danarius growls, and comes buried inside him. 

The ache in his bones screams louder and louder, until it fades into background noise. 

*

He is balanced on top of Hawke, his knees to either side. Hawke’s hands run up and down his legs, marveling; his fingers trace the ropey muscle, his eyes scraping across Fenris’s body. Fenris keeps his hands on Hawke’s skin always, always--he needs to know.

They have tried most other things Fenris has suggested. Having sex with Hawke does not feel fraught with traps and hairpin triggers any longer; it feels like an old duel, one he could fight in his sleep, one he enjoys for the exercise it gives him. But this they’d only tried once, and Fenris had had to stop, then, and so they try again, at Hawke’s insistence. 

He doesn’t think he’ll come like this. He’s too wound up tight, too caught up inside his own head--but it’s enough that he can do this, that he’s enjoying doing this. He rocks with Hawke until Hawke comes, and it sends shivers through Fenris’s body, but he’s too tired to do more than that and simply gets up to clean himself.

“Are you sure?” Hawke calls after him.

“I am sure,” he calls back. 

Hawke, bless him, does not push. 

When he returns, he lays curled up beside Hawke, his eyes shut against the world. 

“I didn’t think that’d be the hardest for you,” Hawke admits. 

Shame rises, hot. “These things are not as simple as you would wish them,” Fenris says.

“I know that, and I know you’re trying to start a fight.”

Fenris scoffs. The only thing more aggravating than when Hawke is wrong is when he is right. 

“It was good,” Fenris says. “Yes?”

Hawke laughs. “Yes,” he says. “Oh, yes. Definitely yes.”

*

It is easy to please his Master when he wants him on his back, or on his stomach; all he needs to do is lay there, make sounds his Master might want to hear, or just struggle for air and for a moment of respite if that is the mood his Master is in. 

It is harder when he’s above him, when Danarius wants him to move and writhe and act like a sweet little whore, put on a show of how much he loves him, how glad he is to service him. 

“You wonderful creature,” he says. Fenris is still covered in specks of blood; Danarius wipes them with his thumb. “You would have died for me today, wouldn’t you have?”

Fenris does not pause as he moves. “Yes, Master.”

“But you didn’t. You slaughtered them.”

He can still feel the snap of their spines beneath his blade; the assassins sent to kill Danarius, spread out now on the bottom floor of the mansion. Other, less favored slaves sent to clean them up. 

“Yes, Master,” Fenris says. 

“Oh, Fenris. Oh, little wolf. I want you to come for me, just like this.”

“Yes, Master,” Fenris says, and drops his head, and moves with vigor, Danarius’s groans of pleasure filling the chamber. 

*

Merrill sweeps up the room he sleeps in one day when he’s accompanying Hawke to his damned money sink of a Bone Pit. 

He comes back and catches her in the act of placing flowers around the room; plants suspended from the walls, growing curled on the windowsill. 

“Why,” he asks simply. 

Merrill shrugs. “It’s so dreary in here,” she says. “I gave Anders some plants for his place and I think it really brightened his mood. I think you could use that too.”

“I don’t need my mood brightened,” Fenris grumbles, and then scowls when Merrill starts to laugh at him. 

“Okay,” she says. “That’s fine. I think you might like having the plants around anyway.”

He does not.

He insists that he will not.

By the third day, he’s got a watering schedule for them. By the fifth, Hawke’s come up with names. 

By the end of two weeks, when one of them starts to fade, he calls Merrill back to make her tell him what’s wrong with it so that he can fix it, and she doesn’t laugh at him once. 

*

This is the first time.

Fenris is not yet called that yet; he has another name, but his Master has told him that it will not last, and he might as well discard of it now, so he has. He is walking through the gardens with this new master; Danarius, his name is, which will last, on and on and on. 

“You fought impressively,” Danarius tells him. “And using your favor to free your mother and sister was noble. You are a unique little elf, aren’t you?”

He doesn’t know if Danarius wants him to answer, so he doesn’t. He follows along silently as Danarius takes another turn through the rows of spiraling hedges. 

“I understand you were born with a womb,” Danarius goes on. “But you have been raised as a young man, have you not? As the elves sometimes do?”

He nods. It is not that simple, but Danarius is not a human slave he can talk to frankly about elvhen culture. What Danarius says is the truth, and so he nods.

“Hmm,” Danarius says. And then, “How old are you?”

He stares at the ground. He’s been asked this before. It is never any easier to remember. Too much time has passed; too many birthdays ignored. 

Danarius seems to sense his hesitation, so he asks instead, “Have you menstruated? When did you begin?”

He nods now. Easier. “Almost two years ago, Master.”

Danarius seems pleased by this answer. 

“Are you a virgin, little one?”

He is silent again. Not for lack of an answer altogether, but lack of one that seems complete. 

He’s never been _taken_ , the way the human girls sometimes were. He doesn’t know if it’s because he was an elf or because he was a boy or because he had a reputation for being a bit of a piece of shit to deal with, but most of the guards left him be. Sometimes they would grope at him; one slide his fingers inside once and he broke his nose and was left chained in the basement without food for three days. Then it happened again, and he knocked out their tooth, so they took his sister instead. 

He let them do what they liked, after that. 

“That’s as good an answer as any,” Danarius laughs. “Come here. Let me show you how it can feel, and you can show me how good you are at following orders.”

He falters, but Danarius does not; he undresses him completely, and pushes him to his knees, and fucks him there on the garden pathways, and it hurts but there is a sweet pleasure to it, a feeling of being needed and a feeling of being used. 

*

“I’m proud of you,” Hawke tells him one day, while he’s struggling through a book with such a simplistic story he knows it must be a children’s novel. 

“Do not start this with me,” Fenris warns. He’s told Hawke repeatedly, under no uncertain terms, that he will not be pitied, and his voice is begining to form the shape of pitying. 

“I am not pitying,” Hawke snaps. “I’m proud of Merrill, and I’m proud of Isabela, and I’m proud of Varric, and Aveline, and Anders, and yes, even Carver. And I’m proud of you.”

“And we are all very proud of you too,” Fenris sneers. But he doesn’t look up from his book, now. He fears what he’ll see in Hawke’s face if he does. 

“You’ve all come a very long way,” Hawke says gently. “And none of you had to trust me. You had many reasons not to. But here we are.”

Fenris forces himself to look, now. 

It blinds him. Not pity, or possession.

Just honesty, unfiltered. Or love. Or maybe those are the same. 

“Here we are,” Fenris agrees. 

Hawke’s smile spreads across his face and spills into Fenris’s chest. 

*

Danarius takes him back through the gardens, to a mage who wears the robes of a healer. He stands in the corner and listens to them speak as if he is not there.

_Can you make him barren?_

_Yes, a few ways. I could remove the womb entirely, or we could ablate it. Either will work._

_Which will heal sooner?_

_Ablation. It is more painful, but I won’t have to perform surgery._

_The young lad is good at tolerating pain._

_It should be alright, then. Should I put him to sleep for it?_

_It doesn’t matter to me. You’ll let me know when it is done?_

_Of course, Ser._

On his way out, Danarius looks at him with focused eyes.

“Fenris, I think,” he says. “You look quite like a little wolf.”

Fenris blinks. “Yes, Master,” he says, and it is true. 

The healer gestures to a couch. “Lie back,” he commands. 

Fenris does, his arms and legs laid out straight. The healer sighs at him for reasons he doesn’t understand; and then he does, as his knees are shoved apart. He leaves them there, then.

The healer wrinkles his nose. “Danarius,” he mutters, and takes a wet cloth to clean between Fenris’s legs. It’s cold and unpleasant; Fenris stares at the ceiling. 

Then he takes a glass rod and slides it inside; Fenris squirms, and then gasps out at the pain as it goes deeper, kicks his legs on instinct. 

“Hush,” the healer says, and places a hand on Fenris’s ankle. His body floods with cold, and for a moment he thinks it’s a sleep spell--but then he tries to close his eyes and he cannot, and tries to wiggle his toes and he cannot, and the prickly taste of a paralysis spell is familiar on his tongue. 

“This won’t take long,” the healer says, and then casts something down the wand, hot and electric and burning, and then the pain explodes inside Fenris’s abdomen and has nowhere to go but in, and he cannot scream or move or breathe and so he passes out. 

*

He wakes, gasping.

*

When he wakes, Danarius is there, stroking his hair. 

*

Hawke is there. Hawke is there. Hawke is everywhere, in his face, on his skin, smoothing the hair out from his eyes. 

*

“I told him he should’ve put you to sleep,” Danarius sighs.

*

“It was a dream, Fen. Just a dream. You’re here with me.”

*

“But he never does listen to me. Come, now.”

*

“Come on, cut out the glowy routine, love, it’s okay, it’s just me. It’s just me.”

*

He picks Fenris up and carries him to a bed that is warmer than any Fenris has ever slept in, softer and gentler, and he puts a hand over his forehead, and Fenris sleeps. 

*

Fenris breathes. “Hawke,” he rasps.

“That’s me,” Hawke confirms. “That’s me. I’m here.”

Fenris collapses into the mattress, his heart pounding, his breathing evening out as Hawke traces the patterns along his skin. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” Hawke whispers. 

Fenris feels his throat constricting, his chest growing tight. “You have already heard it.”

“I didn’t ask that.”

Fenris breathes. It is a simple thing, to breathe. 

“No,” he says finally. “I am okay.”

“If you insist,” Hawke says. 

Fenris nods. He reaches a hand out for Hawke’s; Hawke reaches back. 

“Sleep, love,” Hawke murmurs, like it is that simple, and so it is, and so Fenris does. 

**Author's Note:**

> I am on twitter as @besselfcn!


End file.
